3XCO
by Antje
Summary: An old and missing artefact needs to be found before some cranky diplomats decide to declare war on Queen Faunatasia and her fine land of the O.Z. To help track the artefact down, DG enlists the help of an exiled relative, who knows more about the Outer Zone and the Other Side than he's ever admitted. Friends old and new hop a long for the ride, and then stuff happens...
1. A Lily Borrowed

**Title** : 3xCO (phonetically: three ex see oh; written as Three X-C-O; or, three times C-O)  
 **Crossover** : Tin Man/Robin Hood/Night at the Museum 1 & 2  
 **Non-canon Pairings** : Glitch/Cain (non-canon, _really_?), DG/Chessa, Az/Zero, eventual Jedediah/Octavius  
 **Follows** : Lilies Verse, six months after The Breaking Spell... Sort of an alternative universe of Lilies Universe.  
 **Rating** : Teen. Apparently Jed swears. Who knew? Also some manhandling.  
 **Note on the Text** : All pre-chapter quotes attributed to single characters are from their respective shows/movies. The Robin Hood I use is mainly the first season of BBC's Robin Hood (2006) but your favorite Robin will do.  
 **Summary** : An old and missing artefact needs to be found before some cranky diplomats decide to declare war on Queen Faunatasia and her fine land of the O.Z. To help track the artefact down, DG enlists the help of an exiled relative, who knows more about the Outer Zone and the Other Side than he's ever admitted. Friends old and new hop a long for the ride, and then shit happens...

 **3xCO**

 **But the three zones mingle and amalgamate along the edges, like the colors in the solar spectrum.**  
— Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris

Volume One: CHANGE  
 **I.  
** **A Lily Borrowed  
** "My dear chap, better it is for a man that he marry a sympathetic gargoyle  
than a Venus with a streak of hardness in her."  
– PG Wodehouse, _Uneasy Money_

Raindrops permeated all blocks solid, heavy, turning each object to something as fragile and moveable as a tear. Water collapsed to water in the tiny pond, outlined in wild stones shaped by breaths of passing gods. Water, he mused, everywhere. In the pond, in the back garden. Beyond that and beyond that, to the highest Andlermiel peak, to the lacy trees in the eastward plain of Nayierri Monna.

Annix darted his grey-hued eyes quickly, attentively, trying to catch a raindrop as it crashed into its kin. He saw it pile up. He saw it rise eagerly into puddles. He'd been awake since dawn. He'd helped Mistress tend to the horse, packed her haversack, watched her leave. But Liegess was upstairs, the tower bedroom, still asleep.

Aqua lilies, the _Siacullat_ of ancient tongue, caught all the light when trees held none. Their cup-shaped petals faced the falling clouds, caught the substance, drank it down. Liegess liked the aqua lilies best. He ventured into the harmless fray, plucked one, and dropped it to the breakfast tray. It mattered little how many he took, one each morning, one every hour. Every day, since Liegess planted them, they grew fiendishly fast, ready to sprout and be adored and ogled and loved. In a few hours, when the rain stopped, when Annix next passed the pond, the lily would return, as though he hadn't held it at all.

He called her Liegess. In his vernacular, it meant princess. But he was apt to call the rain fire and the sky lead, as likely as he was to call a princess anything but Liegess.

Lee. Jess. Such syllables ran together perfectly, sonorously. Oh, mellifluously. He hobbled up the staircase, for his kind always hobbled no matter the carefulness of storybook descriptions. But he hobbled on legs that no tree stump envied, with a tray that never hobbled itself but remained steady. He had carried trays for six months, since the last of the bones from the old cottage had gone and the Tower was built on a once-haunted foundation. He knew bones and trays and secrets of the staircase. He knew where the mice lived and where they watched him. He knew how to use his fundament to push in the bedroom door.

He knew that a lily borrowed in the morning would always return to her watery bed to sleep at night, and be there the next day.

In an score of light, Annix beheld the new lily. A shade of blue plagued its pearly gown. Colour unnaturally given. A message without text, without lyrics. A song buried in a dead wind. A poem written with an inkless pen. A hint of colour, and a princess in a tower who'd know what to do.

Some witches read cards, others tea leaves. Some witches read thoughts and palms. Some read the speckles in eyes. Some read nothing at all but merely felt secrets. But his witch, the Liegess—Lee Jess—Liegess—she read petals, read mornings, read omens in morning mist and suns-kissed clouds. She read things that normal humans were not allowed to see. Invisible things, books, poems, verses. She heard songs sung by dead kinsmen and myths. She painted places unseen for generations, buried by time and lost to memory.

She was his first mistress. He was her gift. Her pet. Her manservant. The one who looked out for her. Who cleaned. Cared. Brought trays of breakfast for her when Second Mistress was away.

Carefully blowing on the lily, to wake it, as it'd drooped and drowsed in its tiny vase, Annix tiptoed into the silent room. Such a lovely room, he thought of it again. How bare it'd been! Now veils of pink covered the windows, the bed posts. Artwork done by Liegess hung from stone. A tapestry in the corner, brought from Liegess' home, was unsettled in the shift of air.

Annix set the tiny glass vase to its humble spot, its point, he thought, of origin. Where lilies came to be born again. He blew on it a second time. The tapestry shifted again. Talking to him, saying things that hadn't ears for. An old spell book propped up the tray. He'd rattled enough. He'd woken the tapestry, the lily, the veils at windows and bedposts. Now it was time for Liegess to open her eyes. Annix waited, fingers hovering anxiously at his lips. She would remember, he hoped, and he wouldn't have to tell her. She wouldn't go, he hoped, and he wouldn't have to coax her.

He was only a gargoyle. And they were not good for much but talking alliteratively, for carrying trays, for waking lilies, for carrying rain away.

The tapestry lifted its fringed skirt. The lily drifted upward. The veils billowed slightly, always asking "What if…? What if…?" And he knew nothing of What If.

DG opened her eyes, having sensed the change, the shift as subtle as a blue petal on a lily.


	2. Common Presence

**II.  
** **Common Presence  
** "They slept standing, breaking their slumbers to shift from place to place."  
– Miguel Cervantes, _Don Quixote_

It was Teddy who first noticed, but he saw it through adoration's eye, tipped that way, as it had been for fifty years. Had he not been in love, never would it have been noticed. It would have slipped by, perhaps unfelt, unseen, indistinguishable from every other piece, from dust bunnies beneath curios and statues. Undoubtedly, it would've flown by, had Teddy Roosevelt not been in love with Sacajawea.

They had given her a door to the rotten world wherein Lewis and Clark argued over a disputed course. At least there was a door into the glass world, her diorama with mountains in a misty backdrop, expertly painted by some man long since dead. She had foliage and a boat, wherein slept a baby that never woke, _mon petit Jean Baptiste_ , she sometimes called him. Clark called him Pompy, if Clark spoke at all. He and Lewis were often so engrossed in a half-century argument that they rarely noticed the door. Or perhaps it was Teddy Roosevelt's common presence, nearly every night at sundown for the last two years, that kept the famous explorers from exploring the realm of New York City's Museum of Natural History.

The museum had closed for the night. The people had gone. Work was done. Rather willingly, Sacajawea let Teddy help her through the glass door, to the unbreakable, unfading woodsy place. Even if unreal, he still smelled pine needles in her braids and a puff of air carried a perfume of some faraway, invisible lake. He took her hand, lowered to kiss it, and saw her do what she hadn't done in years: she looked into the matte painting.

'What is it, my dear?'

'Nothing, but I thought I heard… I thought…' Sacajawea faced Teddy, and remembered that unpleasant things were scarce, and remembered that life could be like this, magical and liveable. The fingers in hers were squeezed. In a few minutes, the first glint of sunshine gold would transform warmth to wax. 'It isn't important.'

'Anything you see is important to me. Anything you think is what I would like to know.'

She smiled, his lines delivered by honesty, as though stars spoke them, or—she didn't know yet what it was—as though Teddy gathered them from a field of Beautiful Things to Say and gave the field to her. Again, though, the rattle from behind split the surface of her peace. She looked to Lewis, to Clark, but they were arguing. She looked into the matte painting, every brushstroke known to her. A mountain, she knew its name, but its name varied day to day.

Teddy pressed her hand, hailing her back from forgotten places, nameless lands. 'Hello, Princess? Where are we? I'm sure it is lovely in your world. You will have to show it to me sometime.'

It wasn't fair, that statement. He had already been. He thought he had, with vague images of trees high, where leaves never fell and spring never died. Something in the air made him real. But light in his world flushed against the windows. Prettily, though hurriedly, Sacajawea's hand was kissed.

'Whatever troubles you,' he started, paused, seemingly forming his ending, 'it will not seem so dreadful in the morning.'

She laughed in that speculative way of hers, afraid that if she laughed outright the moon would run away and tomorrow night would never come.

He closed the door, waved, and she rolled her eyes at the ceaseless antics of her cell companions.

Beside Texas, already on the wooden dais where they spent their days, Teddy whistled through his teeth. The horse showed no reaction, but it was the night guard that interested him. Larry jumped at the noise, whipping out the flashlight though its beam was too weak against the strengthening dawn.

'What's the matter with you, Lawrence? Ants in your pants?' He was on Texas, grasping the souvenir cutlass, when Larry Daley reached him. He had seen that same expression on Sacajawea moments before. What had he missed? Something in the moon, maybe, a shift in the stars and the moon. The whole cosmos. The galaxy. Those things he contemplated but didn't wish to look into.

'Yeah, no, Teddy, I'm fine. Free of ants, anyway.'

'But?' Teddy could coax it from him. If it was insipid, he didn't want to hear it. If it was troublesome, too provoking, he didn't want to hear it. Not at the start of the day and the end of his day.

'But—I don't know.' Larry angled his head about. Rexie, the playful Tyrannosaurus Rex, contorted his structure of bone and wire into Standard Position. All around him, the hush of that first daylight hour crept across him, and still the hum and rattle failed to dissolve. 'I've had this weird feeling all night, you know? Like—like I'm waiting for a giant beetle to jump out at me. Man,' he sighed, 'if Dr McPhee ordered a giant beetle to be on display, I'm going to be pretty mad about that, I can tell you. How would I keep Jedediah from riding a giant beetle?'

'Lawrence.'

'Yeah, Teddy? What?'

'There is no giant beetle. I feel very strongly about this. Is there a full moon? Solar flares? Is the cosmic atmosphere upsetting you in any way? Even Sacajawea had her sorts out of place.' He drew the cutlass, swerved his arm to Standard Position. Any second, that One Second, would come, and he would forget, fall into the Lost Pit.

'Sacajawea?' was all Larry could say before sunlight filled the sky, filtered through the smoky glass, and froze all of his friends for another eleven hours, thirty minutes. Larry let out a long breath, extending it until his lungs shrivelled and ached, then drew in everything fresh. He made three more rounds, snooping, scoping, looking for the giant beetle, the proverbial beast.

Everything slept soundly. Everything was as it should be.

Though, when he walked by Sacajawea a final time, he thought her head a little tilted to the south, towards the trees, towards the nameless mountain. She'd smiled kindly when he asked about the mountain, the trees, whether it was Montana or Oregon. 'It is both,' she said, 'and it is probably more than Montana and Oregon.'

Yeah, her head was definitely tilted. No one would notice. But he knew. The admonitory phrase paraded across his weakened, fatigued mind once again, whether said by Teddy, by Jed, by Octavius, by an odd, misshapen meld of all three, Larry heard it as a sombre chorus. Something about the moon, the universe, a shift in the cosmos.

He went home to browse history books until his eyes wouldn't stay open. When history failed, geography failed him in a new and different way.

The mountain behind her didn't exist. The mountain went on having no name.

And the moon was waning gibbous, nowhere near full. It frightened him so terribly for a moment that he drew a frozen breath, held it, and let it slip away.

Nick had given him a Magic 8 Ball for Christmas. What do you get the father who has everything, who's so happy that presents are tomorrows and memories of yesterday? You gave him magic—or a conduit of magic's allure. Larry grabbed it from the dresser and shook it, repeating his question aloud.

'Is the world going to end? Is the world going to end? Is the world going to end?'

He opened one eye, too afraid of the Magic 8 Ball's answer to see it with two eyes. Behind the eerie blue liquid, the text clarified.

 _Reply hazy, try again._

He set the toy down. He didn't want to try again.

Before climbing between sheets, he checked the dark corners for signs of a beetle waiting to start a massacre. Nothing was there, only shapeless, featureless things that drifted in and out and sometimes over Larry's contorted thoughts, so he saw but wisps of them, like remainders of a spider's abandoned web.


	3. Tales Woven

**III.  
** **Tales Woven  
** "I keep my visions to myself."  
– Deep Dish, _Dreams_

So restless, deep into his bones. Though it didn't originate there, only propagated there. Marrow and white blood, screaming to be undone. Drop into the Earth, The Canvas, the Sea—something to release me.

He paced the wood, a wild deer stalking no prey, no sound. A quivering leaf on a blue beech, maybe. A squirrel with a nut in its mouth darted ahead raucously. He knew where he was by the sudden twist in front of him. Two trees, like Sisters, woven together in their first limbs. Reaching for The Canvas, he supposed.

It was good to run, to get it out of his bones. It would never leave him now. Only if he died, if others did, if all of them did. If everyone, all at once, forgot his existence. Then the marrow would rest. The Earth would rise. The Sea would sigh. The Canvas would unravel. He would forget, too, the lust of Something More acidic in his skin.

With paces through, going to the end of the forest and back another route, he stood in the creek. Water up to his ankles, covering his boots. A filigree of algae and unknown green things fluttered in the current. He stayed until he heard it crying for its home. We've lost our home, it said. We've lost our home.

So have I, he said.

He left the stream to cry itself back to the sea. Along the way, one Way, some Way—the Ways no longer had names—things were innominate after Acre—he found berries that had been missed, he found edible agarics, he found one of his arrows lodged in a cranky oak tree. He took it out, patting the trunk with thanks, and let the arrow fall into the quiver at his back. Learned from _her_ , of course. Men did not wear quivers on their back before he came along, moved along, went along. He'd travelled too much and learned too many things. The quiver at his back, not at his hip. The bow with the outward curves, one at the top, one at the bottom, was strictly Saracen.

They would never wear quivers, never make bows—never think of them the same because of him. What he'd stolen, gleaned from other cultures, places he'd seen, actions he'd done. He had immortalised them. Accidentally. His whole life, one trivial accident following a glorious pursuit. He would've been an earl dumb to the pleas and injustices of his immediate world had he not pursued glory, followed the cries he heard when he slept, the shadows of those destroyed by an unfeeling fiduciary. And now he was back here, again—until it stopped being written, until he was forgotten, swept into the Sea, the Earth, swallowed by the yaw of The Canvas—however it was done.

The little fire lay smouldering in its chaplet of damp, lichen-nibbled stones. Beside it, Much was asleep on a propped-up hand. He dreamed of brighter, simpler things than once before. Food, most commonly. He wove tales for his friends' amusement from the pieces given by his dreams. They were not children's dreams, those of Much, but a man's dreams, full of symbols and buttoned memories.

Much snorted awake with the shuffling of leaves. He moved his fingers at his cheeks, looking round, always startled to find he was outdoors, away from childhood, walls, a roof at least. 'Oh, good morning, Master! Have I been asleep long? I think I was dreaming about a tortoise who sang songs for a gypsy queen. But I can't be certain. Well, how can I? What have you brought? Mushrooms! Where did you find these?'

'He swiped them from the Sherriff's larder, I'd say.'

'Master has not been in the Sheriff's larder!' He looked to be sure, was satisfied by the silence received, and stared again at Allan reverently ogling buff coloured mushrooms. 'See! He has not been in the larder! I'm sure these were given to us by a very obliging tree.'

'Probably where Gisborne's horse let some fall. Best fertilizer for growing mushrooms of these sorts.' Allan cupped his hands around one of the mushroom crowns, rubbing its strange skin. 'I'm claiming this fine agaric in the name of Allan A Dale of Sherwood Forest.'

'Not of Locksley,' Much interposed rather humourlessly.

'Well, not of Locksley unless it's convenient. What else is in the sack?'

'Scrumptious berries!' Much held the gathered bundles high. Allan threw up his hands and hooted. In the background, Djaq laughed, soft as the wind, lithe as a moon's shadow and cat's paw prints. She had not been with them long, and Roy had not been gone so long that Little John came from his cerecloth and spruce tent to laugh with them. Will was nowhere to be seen, perhaps fletching arrows, practising weaponry, otherwise busy.

At the edge of the encampment, he halted, waiting, listening. Magic rested in the act of listening. There was a voice of winter, shrill and high-pitched. The same voice of summer, but moved by solemnity to speak dulcetly. Though he didn't favour climbing trees, he did so then, ending up with sap on his hands but an unequal view of the creek's valley. Something timid had occurred. Something in the world was there that hadn't been there yesterday. He looked for it at the tip of the trees. That's where she kept secrets. Not in the wind. Not in Little John's snoring or Much's repasting dreams. But there, that place, the light of the trees against the sky. He could see it best at twilight. He had no words for it, not in East Midland English, anyway. Not in Latin. He would have to go back to a language older than those.

' _Kannak mei matinn iäm lakkerniel_.' He whispered the prayer's beginning to the opening crease between trees and sky. Earth and the void. Time and everything beyond its grasp. Space, he might have called it, but the name was an ill fit against the inexpressible. Every word made what he saw purely counterfeit. ' _Garelli?_ ' He tried a final name.

But all it brought him was Will. He thought, during those times he spotted Will Scarlett wandering through the woods just after sunset, before moonrise, if Will hadn't been there, too. If he hadn't tipped too far forward one morning, lingering too long in a dream, and woken in a glade that belonged Elsewhere, Somewhere—perhaps even Nowhere. If he spoke in tongues to Will just then, if he said garelli, what would Will do, what would Will think of him?

'Where've you been?' said the voice from below. Will looked into the horizon, the scintillation of sunbeams caught in dancing tree branches. Then something more wondrous occurred to him. 'And why are you up a tree?'

'I was out getting some food.'

Will tossed a careful scrutiny towards the campfire. But his black brows bent inwards, and upwards he looked, to a leg in brown breeches and a rather shaggy brown head. 'I wasn't aware that we were out of food.'

'We're not. We weren't.' Exasperated by the sharpness of it all, the difference between the reality he lived and that in his head so appallingly cavitary, he swung from the binding branch to solidity. Whatever he presented, he gave it cheerfully. 'I have reason to believe we'll be expecting company—maybe for dinner.'

'Dinner? Who? Lady Marian?'

'No.' He spun about so fast that Will dropped his steps, his heels in loam and last autumn's leaves. 'Would you believe me if I told you that I don't know who it is?' Then he knew he would have to say it, let it stay in the air and fester in the mind of someone else for a while. A legend knew a legend, and this aspect of them could not be undone. 'Maybe someone named Garelli. Or from Garelli.'

Will repeated the syllables, shifting them with breath and tongue. 'Garelli. I don't know him. Sounds familiar, though. Has the Sheriff mentioned him?'

That meant nothing. It was inconclusive. Garelli could be anything, anyone, a touch of the fey in a western cloud, a smile of a baby, a song in the reeds, the happy hum of fungus. A garelli was the mystical latched to magical, a cantrip in anything. Why would Will know? But that he was garelli, too. Magic gave men a strange sense of serenity.

'Someone is coming for dinner,' Will publicly announced.

A confused Much eventually shut his jaw, while Djaq posed questions Will had no answers to. From sharpening shadows, Little John looked up, looked out, and roused himself to join them.

'This,' said Little John, looking into the ground, 'I find interesting. Who is it?'

'Someone named Garelli,' was all Will had to offer.

Allan pondered this, his expression showing the depth of his thought. 'Wait. Wait. I know this one. It's a smelly sort of cheese, isn't it? From Italy. Yeah, I'm sure it is,' he went on, when they stared at him. 'I think I've even eaten some. What? I have. Involuntarily. Tasted like horse's ass. Or an ass's ass, if you'd rather. I'm not a connoisseur of ass's ass, but as far as garelli goes, it is quite near tasting like the real thing.'

'I don't think it's a kind of cheese,' Will eventually said, always with a hint of reprimand lurking in his even tone. 'I don't know what it is.'

'I thought you just said it was a who,' said Much, 'not a what. How can a what come for dinner? Which is it, then? A who or a what?'

'What?' asked Little John, who hadn't quite followed along. 'Or who?'

'Well,' Allan shrugged his shoulders, 'your guess is as good as mine. Shall we vote? Who would like to vote? A what—or a who?'

Much's face went into turmoil. 'What?'

'One vote! A vote for what! Do I get a who? Who will raise Much's what with a who?'

'Oh for the love of Mary,' mumbled Much. 'Which is it, Will? A what? A who? It cannot be both.'

Will did not know this either. A palsy came upon him then, and he let it stricken him. Much, tired of deliberating, speaking yet saying nothing of consequence, shifted from loose leaves and stormed the distance to his master.

'This is ridiculous. What is—who is—Garelli? I demand an answer.'

A myth. A legend. A piece of magic in the curling fist of the world, of time, of whatever it was that held up the sky, sang in the sea, repeated everything. That was a garelli.

'Master, you're acting a bit—a bit—well—odd.'

What was a garelli? He sifted it through the sands of memory, across nameless faces in his history. It was not him, nor her, nor that thing there. What was it? He almost had it. Then it left him, went elsewhere.

It went to Will.

'The wind has changed,' Will said. 'Robin, are you sure this garelli is going to show? I think it's going to storm in an hour or so.'

Then Robin, leaning into a tree, began to laugh, an assiduous laugh that calculated its way from his blitheness to the air to the change of the wind. Much creased his arms and sighed. This wouldn't do for him. Had he his druthers, Robin would go straight to bed, take a medicinal agaric if need be, and sleep dreamlessly. But he was tapped lovingly for the worry displayed, the concern painting his features, haunting the back of his eyes. Robin leapt gracefully to a nearby log, perched there, scanning the visible heavens. The trees were obliged to sway with the fickle, careless wind. This capriciousness—this was a garelli. A magical thing suddenly there, where it hadn't been but seconds before. The coming of the fey. The whirlwind. The storm.

He wondered what it would be, what it would be like, what it would want with him. He couldn't imagine who'd send for him in the middle of another man's memory. He was trapped here until the end, whatever hour it might be.

She never sent for him. Even if the end of the world were coming, surely she wouldn't send for him. What could Robin Hood do against the end of the world, when he was caged in a cycle of myth, created by his own actions some incalculable time ago? As of yet, he didn't know.


	4. Grand Gathering

Volume Two: UNCONNECTED  
 **IV.  
** **Grand Gathering**

"Aramis, after a journey into Lorraine, disappeared all at once, and ceased to write to his friends…"  
— Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

The condition of the sky and city upon DG's arrival was decidedly unfavourable. In a word: wretched. Drenched with rain and drowning in a melange of fear and regret, DG swooped from her tired horse, the hems of her trousers doused in splashes of mud, the hem of her cloak frayed and old. Witches wear such clothes, she reasoned with the twang of conscience.

Family did not come for her right away, though, with the cross-court cameras, the voice anomaly transmissions, Mother could not be in doubt of her second daughter's presence. Who should step into the deluge but honourable Sir Clyde, fair-headed, curly-haired, smiling till the dimples glistened above his greying beard. He called her 'my lady' and took the reins, saluted and, to himself, thought her pretty though altered, perhaps for the better.

Inside, DG expunged all unwanted tales from her head. Imaginations soar, she decided, and dreaded each inch the undisciplined mind traversed. Again, the rear foyer, nearly as grand as the formal front entrance, lacked persons. The electrical lights were off, the gaslights set to dim. An eerie sensation whelmed her. The inevitable had happened, as she'd known it would, back in the day when she'd left them for her own adventure. Something more had changed.

She wasted no other moment but went straight to her father's first-floor study. A small, unnoticed room crammed with shelves holding trinkets, shelves holding books, tables holding maps in disarray, tables covered in sheaves of unfinished memoirs and other unfinished business. She entered after the invitation, and Dad rose from behind his desk, careered round it, embraced her. Her name landed softly on the hair between temple and ear. When his arms drifted and held her outward, she smiled shakily beneath his gentle scrutiny.

'Your tower agrees with you, I think.'

How grateful she was to hear such words, ample kindness given when he didn't propose thoughts of espousal, to live so far away from home with but a fix-it factotum and a grotesque. A different, roughened version of home, left to create her spells as she was to find magic in a paintbrush. It hadn't been so long since she'd crossed the plains, the hills, the mountains, to Central City, the restored castle, the hugs of parents, the love of a sister and brother.

She answered about the fine state of her health, brushing it aside to discover the meaning of their calling for her. 'A telegram came, but it did not say very much.'

'Ah,' Ahamo loosed his demeanour in one way, lifted defences in another, 'yes, the infamous and quickly approaching state dinner. A triumph of the delegation. Functionaries from all over the O.Z., and ambassadors from other countries. This will not be the first time you have been to the Grand Gathering: You went four years ago.'

'I can hardly remember four years ago,' DG admitted, softly snickering, picking at her riding gloves removed from her hands. She remembered four years ago. Mother's brief pregnancy, which DG had latched to ferociously, adoring the idea, with monstrous tenacity, of being a middle sibling. She would've loved so much having a little brother. There was no doubt in her, even then, that it would've been a boy, as magic seemed to have decided it for all of them. But then catastrophe, and DG had fled to her other home, to Wyatt and Glitch, the companionship too of Chessa, Wyatt's no-nonsense niece, and the ring of Wyatt's off-the-wall marshal friends. She'd returned only to attend the state dinner, otherwise known as the Grand Gathering, although Glitch called it the Golden Ball, and wasn't sure why Wyatt had laughed so hard hearing the old moniker.

She sidled uneasily about the room. Tired from the journey—twelve hours on horseback. It was half after nine in the evening, the bonging tall clock told. A hand scraped along her hair. She stopped by the window with a view of the rose garden, the fountain where the lilies grew, where she first knew she loved Glitch and Glitch loved her. Almost eight years removed from the present.

But it was monumentally unimportant. She swerved to her father. Soft and sweet, sure of himself. He hadn't Queen Faunatasia's sharpened tongue or quick action. But he had gumption and willpower, patience, depth of understanding, though his foresight was lacking, as though he hadn't yet grown into the wisdom of knowing people well. A distorted gurgling within DG's conscience struggled against the current.

'Why bother me about this, anyway? What am I? The little princess. If the Grand Gathering isn't for another—whenever it is—then why have me here so soon? It is too late now for you to tell me something terrible has happened. You would have mentioned it first. Sir Clyde would not have looked so cheerful when I met him in the courtyard. Well?'

He smiled impassively, studying her as she set her hands to her hips. 'You look like your mother when you're ready to curse me. Please don't curse me, little witch.'

'Dad, come on, I'm serious,' she whined and her feet shuffled to give in. 'Why do you want me here? You called me into the rain. You said it was important. Come quickly, DG, I believe is what you said. I know Chessa's out of town and everything, but is that a reason to make me leave the tower? I'm in the middle of something very important, you know!' She lied, and he started to smile again, hooking the end of the lie with his wit.

'You have a multitude of harangues, DG.'

'Well,' she loved sparring with her father, it was as gratifying with him as it was with Zero, who had something of a coarse, dry humour, 'I keep it loaded and ready, a six-shooter at the hip, like Wyatt's.'

'Where's Chessa? I knew she was gone, but I don't know where she's gone.'

DG smashed her lips and pressed them forward, temper fading, wondering at the cause of his delay. Maybe Mother was on her way. 'She's in Goyne Rus Fyrros. She was among those selected to refurbish Fernlach Castle. It's a great honour for her.'

'Yes,' he tapped his chin with a finger, staring into the patterns of the old rug, 'yes, I remember. Fernlach Castle. Beautiful place.'

'It will be, when it's finished. Right now it looks like a midden and some rock. Sea birds perch there and shit all over it. Dad, come on, quit your delaying. The Grand Gathering, what do you want me to do? Put a sleeping spell on them?'

'No, ha, ha,' Ahamo's laugh was high, unexpected, genuine. 'If I wanted them to sleep, I would just stand up and give a five-minute speech on the expectations of the monarchy and how that is going to fulfill their impression of royalty. I'm waiting for your mother.' He slid the sentences together on a single string, words following words, dancing with them. He could do that, such was his power, when he willed it to happen.

What he willed did happen, for the door opened. Faunatasia's sweeping dress robes swirled and ruffled behind her as she hurried to embrace her daughter. DG smelled of rain and rosemary, as Aunt Mellabris once did. She inhaled deeply, a stroke of calm and happiness. DG was as good at fixing things as Chessa Cain was at fixing broken mortar and cracked chandelier chains.

'You're here alone?' Faunatasia searched her daughter for signs of a second presence. 'I heard you arrive, but—where's Chessa?'

'I told you,' DG said, flat and bland, 'she's in Goyne Rus—'

'Good stars, I forgot,' Faunatasia suffered momentarily, placing a palm against her careworn face, 'Goyne Rus Fyrros, Fernlach Castle.' But then she brightened. 'Beautiful place.'

DG's lids narrowed to catch conspiracy's fading scent, of something worse that they didn't wish to speak. 'What do you want me to do? In point of fact, it seems as though you really had Chessa in mind for this—this—this whatever it is!' She flung an arm, letting it go akimbo, to indicate the unpredictability of this wayward Thing.

'Oh, it isn't an enormous deal, DG,' Faunatasia began sweetly. 'Your father has told you about the Grand Gathering? The state dinner?'

'Yes,' DG replied as tartly as she'd spoken before. Placations and platitudes annoyed her after too much use.

'Did your father tell you that Lord Grimpergreetz is planning to be there?'

'Lord Grimpergreetz?' At this point, DG could do nothing but repeat like a parrot and stare.

'Yes,' false blitheness festooned the single word, sending Faunatasia to smile gently, pet her daughter's wrist in her hand. 'He's a distant relation of ours. Third cousin once removed, or some such—you would have to ask Lady Chichester if you wish to know exactly how we are related.'

'Mother, you do realise that I am unavailable for solicitous behaviour towards potential suitors any more, don't you?'

'What?' Faunatasia turned blank, seemed to go back a page, read the message left there, and return to the present in a state of laughter. 'Oh, yes, DG. I am not hoping that you and Lord Grimpergreetz will become a matched pair, good stars, my angel, no! Already, his behaviour is not the sort that will win him friends or influence court. Here.' She angled to her spouse, waiting for an object he had readied beneath one of his favourite maps. 'Here, DG.'

A page in the tome, with thick, cloth-like pages, was marked by a ribbon and opened there. On it, an image covered in tissue paper, that peeled away slowly, with crinkles, a dried layer of adherent second skin. Behind it, a picture familiar, a set of quaint little slippers that a tiny girl with tiny feet, though not quite Thumbelina herself, might have worn, danced in—flown to her escape in.

'The shoes of the Greatest-Great?' repeated DG, the parrot, the enraptured daughter of Gales.

'Yes,' Faunatasia became stern, stubborn, slamming the book with angry flair. 'They were designed by a relative of Lord Grimpergreetz, and now he wants them back.'

'But,' it caught her, abruptly, why this was so bad, 'we don't have them.'

'Of course we don't. Yet Grimpergreetz wants them. If he doesn't have them by the last night of the state dinner, he'll run his army into our country.'

After the declaration, DG shook her head, swaying drying hair, rolling tender, tired eyes. Agape, she glanced once at father, huffing as she looked at mother. 'This is the silliest thing I've ever heard of! Ask Ambrose to make you a new pair. It's unlikely Grimpergreetz will know the difference. I heard they only flew once—once, and the magic was taken out of them. It's true, too. I'm a witch, Mother; I understand how spells work. Ask Ambrose to make you another pair, and end this silliness of shoes. Ambrose could even make Grimpergreetz a pair that will fit.'

Ahamo snickered conspicuously behind his cupped hands. He sat comfortably still to absorb Faunatasia's silent reprimand. The serious-minded queen continued.

'Grimpergreetz is not a man I should like to cross—however he wishes to dress in his private life, in magical shoes or belts or—or ermine pelts! He has one of the strongest armies at his disposal, not to mention a formidable alliance with many surrounding nations. And while it has been eight years since the end of our civil war, the strife remains. The people are tired, blistered, and haven't forgotten yet what the fight was, what it was like. I cannot ask them to go through such an ordeal another time. Never again, not while there's still a breath in my body and magic in my soul.'

'You take his threat to heart,' DG surmised. The corner of her sight guided her to fling into the nearest chair. 'I understand your concern, Mother, if you feel that Grimpergreetz will follow through with his threat, leading the army into the O.Z. Have you informed Ambrose about this? He knew Grimpergreetz. They were friends.'

'That bond was broken long ago,' Faunatasia claimed, sidetracked into remembrances. She paced, folding arms, touching her neck. A whorl of grey-brown hair bobbed behind a glittering earring. 'Ambrose and Wyatt are still on sabbatical in Far Corners. They will be here for the state dinner. Ambrose assured me of that before they went on their way. But the problem is here, now—and I want you to do something for me, DG.'

DG lifted her gaze, not her head, a bored, nonchalant manoeuvre that Ahamo dreaded, but that Faunatasia had conveniently forgotten the imprecations of.

'It isn't an action I wouldn't normally ask my child to do.'

'Then ask Zero,' DG interrupted. She frowned as her father opened his mouth to speak, shoving words back in when he saw his inappropriateness. 'Oh, he's busy preparing security for the event, I suppose. Dammit.' She picked at the end of the chair's arm, with flat nails broken and chipped after poring over spell books of the wicked and old witches from all the Outer Zone directions. She had hoped, idly, to pass the task along to someone else. Zero was her closest doppelgänger, the one most ready to take action, to risk his life for it. He was less inclined to leave since his last birthday, since marrying Azkadellia, since he took on the curing of Headcases. He did the latter so profoundly, unbrokenly, that throughout the realm they sang of the duty as Zero's Lament. As though he was to blame for broken Headcases everywhere. Like Glitch.

She sighed and slid her sight around the room. Comfortable, lived-in, masculine, yet it felt oddly foreign to her. She had shifted too much, mislaid something of herself, the night she realised Glitch and she had to love Wyatt if they were going to save him, and the months and months she'd stayed in Issilthrush, and a life unexpectedly brilliant atop an old, ragged, craggy hill at the base of the Andlermiel mountains. What was this but another adventure along the way?

'All right,' DG rubbed down an eyebrow, a signature of understanding, a key to her parents' relaxation, 'what do you want me to do?'

Faunatasia breathed relief. 'You need to find your Great Uncle.'

'Oh,' she was not perplexed by this, 'him. Decide to lob him out of exile, have you?'

'That is his decision.'

'Mother, he was sent into nothing less than Purgatory!'

'We've not the time to argue this! Take your uncle's case to the High District Court, if you feel so strongly about it! But, as of now, DG, he is the only one who might have the slightest idea where those slippers are.'

'Only because he's been around so long! He was probably here when they were worn!'

Ahamo cut the thickness of the air, puncturing the tension further by another crooked smile. He adored the wily, unpredictable motions of DG's mind, partly possessed now by asymmetrical Cain cynicism. 'He wasn't, DG, honestly—he wasn't. Your mother speaks the truth, and I have consulted other mythology experts. He really might know where they are. We need you to find him, talk to him, see if he can help.'

'He'll laugh in my face,' DG intoned blandly. The task, however, filled her with no reluctance. Against her wishes, she was curious about her famous great-times-several uncle. She'd come across his tale in one of the leather-bound books lodged in the library, on a dusty rack. The pages had fluttered out as she opened it, so great was its age, so flawed was its spine, closed for a hundred or more years. The chronicles of her uncle's sordid history, lodged in a story unending, the man so adored that time folded and obliterated itself for him.

'Fine,' she muttered, disgusted with herself, unable to look at her mother's pleased face. 'How do I find him?'

'There's a path you have to follow. Your father has the map. Ahamo, please, the map.'

'I'm working on it—let me find—' He pottered about, tabletop to tabletop, spectacles slipping from the bridge to the ball of his nose. Papers shifted, slipped together in the sibilants of old lovers; he moved them aside, moved books, periodicals, newspapers, other maps momentarily regarded and soon disregarded—until finally a triumphal 'Ah!' more than a clearing of his throat.

DG took the map, three creases in yellowed canvas, and unwound it to find a small image. It had the look of an abstract. Was it a painting of a modernist O.Z. painter, or a map? 'I don't get it. It's a squiggly line and some sort of—'

'Just take it,' Ahamo insisted. 'It's a changing map. Have you heard of them?'

'A changing map?'

Faunatasia found the word less likely to roll from Ahamo's undisciplined tongue, but pronounced in DG's mind where everything was a spell. 'A _prirganna amana diosi_.'

'Oh.'

DG recalled the near past. Chessa, golden hair leaping over her shoulders, the ends touching the sheaves of an old book found at an antiquarian shop in Rhodonne, south and far from everywhere. The book was handily _A Dictionary of Spell Casting Terms_. At night, they each read from it, slowly pronouncing the names, or trying to, laughing, and forming tales from the definitions indited as riddles. Inevitably, they would laugh till tears shone in their eyes, and fall asleep with happy dreams in the weave of their thoughts, the enormous book between them. It had been seventy plat, but very worth it, worth twice that.

'I've heard of those. It's an unfolding map without folds. It creates itself according to the possessor. So,' she traced a forefinger along the line—and when she had finished, the line had changed, moved. It showed a little childish drawing of a castle, merely a tall, machicolated tower with a pennant at the roof pinnacle. And from the centre of this tower ran the representation of the Old Route, the Yellow Road, into the Wilderness of the West Which Was Formerly East. Now she knew where to go, but—but already knew where to go. The line would shift, the castle would leave, as soon as she left it. The map would, as Ahamo said, grow the longer she wandered the open road.

'Where will the path take me? Where is the endless path into his exile?'

Now the task lay in the capable hands of her daughter, Faunatasia doubted its necessity. How silly it was, sending her daughter after a distant relation unseen for years, who might begrudge Princess DG all her rights as a member of royalty—who might hurt her, who might be locked in a hell of demons, wherever the writers shoved him. She lost strength, wilted, saddened by the loss, the hopelessness, the indistinct cause. 'He used to write letters… But, one day, the letters stopped coming. We had to assume he was all right.'

'Mother, where am I going?' When DG saw her mother's eyes, tears glittered in them, like lavender sand covered in lost diamonds. A faraway glare within the gaze made her homesick, unsure what for. 'Mother?'

'The letters were marked with the stamp from Woodshire.'

'Then I'm going to Woodshire,' she lifted the map as she started to rise, 'if the prirganna amana diosi takes me there.'


End file.
